"There
will be a day, not far distant, when you will be able to conduct
business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up any
great entertainment, make friends, attend neighborhood markets,
and show pictures to distant relatives--without leaving your desk
or armchair. It will be more than an object you carry or an appliance
you purchase. It will be your passport into a new, mediated way
of life."
Bill was born on October 28,
1955, in Seattle, Washington. Bill's parents are William H. and
Mary Gates. Bill got his education from Lakeside, a private high
school, and a major of Prelaw at Harvard.
Bill Gates was the middle child. His father was a lawyer. His mother worked in business, education and public service. School was very easy for Bill and he learned very quickly. Most people who knew him say that it was impossible to win an argument against him because he knew so much. Bill Gates was an outcast in school because his interests were very different from others.
By 1970, he was sent to a private school in Seattle called Lakeside. There he discovered computers and fell in love with them. His school bought computer time for a year. Bill Gates was addicted; he would read them constantly.
He became good friends with Paul Allen, another computer whiz. Pretty soon, they became very good programmers. To learn more about computers, they would sometimes climb into trash bins of local computer companies to find programmers' old notes.
Finally, he got a job working out computer bugs. Soon, Paul and he also organized a company called the Traf-o-data; it recorded traffic data for his town and it was very profitable. He also developed some programs for his school. One kept track of payroll, and the other kept track of class scheduling. This mean he could put himself in the classes he wanted
In high school, he was an eagle scout and was rewarded with a trip to Washington D.C. to become a page in the U.S. Senate. By 1973, he was offered a job to write a program to control electric power supply for the entire Pacific Northwest. It was a long time to miss half of his senior year, but he took it.
In 1974, he attended Harvard.
His major was Prelaw. College was also very easy for him, so he
tried to see how few classes he could attend and maintain A's.
He spent a lot of free time playing poker or other leisure activities
and programming as well.
When
he was at Harvard he created a programming code for Altair called
the BASIC. There was a picture of the Altair 8800 on the cover
of Popular Electronics with the headline "World's First Microcomputer
Kit to Rival Commercial Models." This was a big opportunity
for Bill and Paul Allen they both knew the home compture market
was going to expaned and people would need computers for there
homes. He dropped out of college and started Microsoft. It developed
programs for several companies such as Apple and Radio Shack.
MITS stands for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.
In the '80's, their big break came. They were asked to make an operating system for IBM. So, Bill bought an existing one from a Seattle company. He improved it and licensed it to IBM. It was called MS-DOS.
By 1985, Microsoft went public. They split the company into shares for sale on the stock market. Before the programmers of Microsoft weren't paid very well and worked long hours. After this went public, everyone got rich and were happy. Bill is a very hard person to work for. He is often rude, sarcastic, and impatient when people don't catch on easy or get things right the first time. He has not that many employees so he can keep in touch with every single one of them.
Spreadsheets came out in the 80's it was a word processing systems. Multitasking for windows came out in 1985 , it had more graphics, and was more user-friendly. In 1983, Paul Allen got cancer and left Microsoft. Now Bill had to find someone new so he hired Jon Shirley to handle all of the business so that he could take care of all of the programming. Around in the 90's, came several new updated versions of windows, some new features included computer networking, and more CD technology. Bill had created MSN and Internet Explorer and put them on all windows for free. You didn't even have to pay for the service to use this. MSN is the second largest Internet service provider and it still today.
In
1994, Bill Gates married an employee, Melinda French. They currently
have two children. He also founded Corbis, which has the largest
variety of graphics. Also, his wife and he created a foundation
to support Global Health and learning.
http://www.elan.org/me/highschoolprojects/billgates.cfm
http://www.time.com/time/gates/gates2.html
http://www.elan.org/me/highschoolprojects/billgates.cfm
